Time out

Can't be asked anymore, quite frankly - with the latest yet ongoing shenanigans of Australia's Immigration Department, reality has now well and truly surpassed even my humble little polemic here. I literally can't keep up with it anymore. I'll leave this blog online as a reference tool for interested souls, and you never know - maybe I'll revive it somewhere down the line.

Sweet dreams, Australia.

FACT/COMMENT: A rich education

Ah, Australia, Land of the Fair Go and Equal Opportunity for All... who are rich.

Student debt is set to soar, with a new forecast revealing that fee-paying university students will borrow $825 million a year by 2008 to pay for degrees costing up to $200,000. (...) More than 50 undergraduate degrees cost at least $100,000, while a few - such as medicine at the University of Melbourne - charge $210,000.

(from the Sydney Morning Herald)

FACT: drug-taking in Australia

Use of cannabis - percentage of population aged 15+ responding they had used cannabis in the previous twelve months, 1999

1. New Zealand 22.2
2. Australia 17.9
3. USA 12.3
4. UK 9.0
5. Switzerland 8.5

Use of amphetamines - percentage of population aged 15+ responding they had used amphetamines in the previous twelve months, 1999

1. Australia 3.6
2. UK 3.0
3. New Zealand 2.5
4. Switzerland 0.8

Tiffen and Gittens point out that "although it is difficult to know the reasons for these figures, it is also the case that the countries that are highest on self-professed drug-taking are among those where government social expenditure is least and social inequality greatest. It would be unwise to accept the Australian figures on self-confessed drug-taking uncritically. It would be equally unwise to simply dismiss them as an unreliable aberration." (my emphasis)

(Source: Tiffen and Gittens, pp. 224-225)

D'you think Tourism Australia would consider my catchy new slogan? "Come down under. Then try to repress that you're actually here"?

FACT: Pollution abatement and control spending in Australia

Expenditure as % of GDP, 1999 or latest available year

17. Ireland 0.6
16. Australia 0.8
15. Belgium 0.9
14. Denmark 0.9
13. Italy 0.9

(Source: Tiffen and Gittens, p. 166)

COMMENT: The invisibility of Aborigines

Above all, what is perhaps oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren’t there. You don't see them performing on television; you don't find them assisting you in shops. Only two Aborigines have ever served in Parliament; none has held a Cabinet post. Indigenous peoples constitute only about 1.5 per cent of the Australian population and they live disproportionately in rural areas, so you wouldn't expect to see them in vast numbers anyway, but you would expect to see them sometimes – working in a bank, delivering mail, writing parking tickets, fixing a telephone line, participating in some productive capacity in the normal workaday world. I never have; not once. Clearly some connection is not being made.

(Bill Bryson, p. 283)

The above of course has to be qualified in some ways. There are a fair few Aborigines in the public eye, be they actors, sportspeople or, to a lesser extent, politicians. However, Bryson's central assertion still holds: as an outsider, the sheer invisibility of Aborigines, and the resolve of non-Aboriginal Australians to keep them invisible and ignore them and everything about them (unless it’s a safe tourist-friendly stereotype) is striking in the extreme.

FACT: Waste generation in Australia

Kilograms of municipal waste generated per person per year, 2000

1. USA 760
2. Australia 690
3. Denmark 660
4. Switzerland 650
5. Canada 640

(Source: Tiffen and Gittins, p.166)

No comment.

Addendum...

...to the post below. Sometimes, timing is everything - I go and post something about David Marr's article, and in today's Sydney Morning Herald letters page, I find the following letter:

Others are worse

David Marr's report ("Geneva v Canberra", Herald, March 28) again has the United Nations and others Howard-bashing and criticising Australia's human rights records.

If these critics cared to take the blinkers from their eyes and look at other countries whose human rights records are nothing short of disgusting, they would see that Australia is and has always been one of the most tolerant countries in the world when it comes to acceptance of other races.

Locking people up in immigration detention centres does not make us racist or intolerant.

Gordon Thomas Darlinghurst

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Australia in a nutshell.

FACT/COMMENT: Australia vs. The World

Nice to see that David Marr is back at the Sydney Morning Herald. And here's a story by him that should be mandatory reading for anyone who's wondering why I'm doing this blog, or why Australia is what it is.

Australia was facing the [UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination]'s scrutiny for the first time in five years. The event went unreported back home and the verdict - handed down on March 12 - was the subject of only a few, scattered reports in the press. Australia was rebuked for its treatment of migrants, Muslims, asylum seekers, refugees and Aborigines. In the eyes of the Geneva committee, the list of this country's failures on the human rights front has only grown longer since the Howard Government came to office.

(snip)

In August 1998, the committee issued Australia with an "urgent action" notice - the first issued to a Western nation. Formal hearings in Geneva the following March found a risk of "acute impairment" to native title rights. The committee declared Australia in breach of its obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This was another first: the first breach finding made against a Western nation.

The former human rights commissioner Mick Dodson remarked sourly: "We're in the same company as Bosnia, Uganda and Ecuador." Canberra took Geneva's verdict very badly. Within 24 hours, the finding was denounced by Howard, Downer and the then attorney-general Daryl Williams, who declared the result "an insult to Australia and all Australians".

(snip)

On March 12 they again gave Australia the thumbs-down. Their language was far more diplomatic this time. Half a dozen positive findings were followed by a list of 19 "concerns and recommendations". Many had been raised before, in 2000. ATSIC, native title, the stolen generation, reconciliation, constitutional protection from racial discrimination, mandatory sentencing, the over-representation of Aborigines in prisons and the fate of HREOC may be dead issues in politics back home, but they're still alive in Geneva.

The list of fresh concerns raised by the committee in 2005 include the impact of temporary protection visas, the plight of stateless long-term detainees, the treatment of asylum seekers by the media, the shortcomings of the Racial Discrimination Act, the impact of counter-terrorism legislation that "may have an indirect discriminatory effect against Arab and Muslim Australians".

(snip)

Yet the race discrimination convention Australia signed up to in 1966 and turned into domestic law in 1975, is still the benchmark for all Australians arguing human rights. It's at the heart of all the rhetoric. The shame of seeing our own failings exposed by the committee was supposed to drive change. It's not working out that way. These days Australia's perceived shortcomings are causing more angst in Geneva than they do back home. (my emphases)

These are only some excerpts from the article - go read the whole thing, it'll be instructive. It's all there: the racism, the couldn't-care-less, the breathtaking arrogance towards the international community, the we-know-better-than-everyone-else, the everyone-else-is-wrong, the total and utter immunity to any form of criticism whatsoever... And Australians keep re-electing this government, election after election after election, because, as one must conclude, they either concur with all of this, or because they don't know and can't be bothered to find out. Either way it's not a pretty picture.

I've put the CERD report up over to the right in the Links section. Have a read.